Capital Letter #2

How to live in London, right now

Dear Readers,

Welcome back to the Capital Letter – edition number two of London’s Only Newsletter, and the last one you’ll see in our regular feed. From March, this guide will only be found here, mailed out with increasing frequency as we set about our mission to wrench down all the gates in the city. It is free, for the time being, but will be paid and paywalled soon, and at an exceedingly agreeable rate.

The actor Chris O’Dowd is back from Los Angeles after some years away. In an interview last week, he expounded on the decline of London, on how the capital is, in his view, ‘down’ and ‘broke’. Respectfully, we think he should go suck on an Erewhon smoothie. There is a darkly exciting energy coursing through the veins of the city at the moment, with at least five must-see shows in the theatre, a bevy of young chefs approaching the peaks of their powers, and a wicked sense of possibility to everything. Here’s our guide on how to live in London, right now.

by John Broadley

But before we get to business, we must add: if you have any places you absolutely adore and would love to see featured in the Capital Letter, send your tips to editorial@the-fence.com. Do share this mail-out among friends, family, colleagues and loved ones. We’re really excited for this, and hope you are too.

On the docket this week, we’ve got shocking opera, fringe comedy and some SW3 gastrogeography. But first, some places to steer clear of. And the best place to have pints in central London. We can’t believe we’re giving this one away.

Soho Confidential

People often ask us: ‘What’s the best pub in Soho?’ Let’s start by going through the worst pubs in the area. There’s the Nellie Dean, of course, and The Toucan – which is a room that serves Guinness and blocks traffic. How it hasn’t been shut down for causing a road fatality is genuinely beyond us. The Argyll Arms has an amazing late-Victorian interior, entirely unchanged, but the ambience of the Caffé Nero in Bristol Airport. The Sun & 13 Cantons bounces with gorpy Boohoo execs, yet is ludicrously expensive.

Of the three Coach & Horses in Soho, two are total no-gos – yes, including that one. We could go on.

After Blondey McCoy made it cool for the streetwear heads, The Blue Posts on Berwick Street has an endearing mish-mash of impeccably dressed Japanese boys, ageing ad men and local market workers clocking off from the lunch rush. It’s not cheap, but it’s a solid choice for two pints on a Monday or Tuesday. Just get there before the doorman. (Why does a pub have a doorman?)

The Old Coffee House on Beak Street is our preferred destination at the moment. It’s a family-run affair with the walls adorned with an agreeably off-kilter array of bric-a-brac: think original Home Guard posters from the Blitz, a portrait of Robert Mitchum and a signed vinyl display case of Robbie Williams’ seminal album, Escapology. The pub is tightly packed, with tables and chairs dotted throughout the room. But unless you bag one of the long tables by the fire, with the flames toasting your witty repartee, then this pub is only an option in the afternoon, unless you derive onanistic pleasure from someone barging past you every five minutes.

The best pubs in Soho aren’t in Soho. Walk ten minutes east to Wellington Street in Covent Garden, and you’ll find yet another Coach & Horses, which does a frothy pint of Guinness and is, at the time of writing, reliably unthronged. Over on Endell Street, you’ll find The Cross Keys, sister pub to The Old Coffee House. It’s a bigger, vibier room with identical tchotchkes to its sibling, and also serves a selection of cold sandwiches, which really are the platonic ideal of pub food.

But your two best options lie to the north, in the environs of the stucco-fronted froideur of Fitzroy Square. The winter sun is setting, the Post Office Tower looms large in the sky and you feel like the protagonist in one of those not-very-good Ian McEwan novels. Stop off first at The King & Queen on Foley Street, where Bob Dylan played one of his first UK gigs, and savour the free and easy atmosphere, before heading round the corner to New Cavendish Street.

The Ship is the best pub in W1. An old-fashioned pub with a lavish interior, loaded with nautical antiques and with soft burgundy banquettes on which to sit and sup. The upstairs room is rarely busy, and for those in want of an extended evening, there’s no finer place in central London.

Having a Laugh (Not Online)

Do you love comedy while studiously avoiding any chance to see it live? Yeah, thought so – same. But as Zoe Paskett tells us, there’s plenty of laughs to be had beyond the Leicester Square Theatre.

Google ‘comedy nights in London’ at your peril. There’s about a 60 percent chance you’ll end up in a Holborn basement squished between two halves of a rapidly disintegrating stag-do. It’s also possible you’ll end up the star of a viral video called ‘COMEDIAN EVISCERATES HECKLER – WATCH TO THE END’. Hey, if that’s your thing, peace be with you. But if it isn’t, we have options.

Venture out to the comedy nights outside of central London, and you’ll have a much higher chance of seeing something new and interesting. You might also spend 45 minutes feeling your soul leave your body, but that’s showbiz, baby. North and east London are heaving with comedy spots. At The Bill Murray club down a backstreet off Essex Road, there’s comedy on every night of the week. You can see some big names if you get in quick enough, and most are less than a tenner because it’s mainly comedians testing out new routines in real time. It’s a great little spot, where the audiences are always willing to go along with the rougher, looser material. But don’t feel apprehensive about seeing a show before it’s fully cooked. That’s the thing that sets live comedy apart: you get to be in the room when the magic happens – and, sometimes, when it really doesn’t.

It’s work-in-progress season, up at the Pleasance Theatre on Caledonian Road. One unmissable feature will be Crybabies on 3 March, the current cream of the sketch comedy crop, building nutty and dramatic narrative worlds that are dizzyingly detailed. In the past they’ve tackled war epics and alien mysteries, and their latest show is teasing the apocalypse. It’s about as cinematic as you can get while performing sketch comedy in a black box.

The complete opposite of a black box, Doña in Stoke Newington is joyously decorated with fuzzy-pink curtains and chaises longues. Their regular comedy night, Frida KahLOL, showcases the best female and queer comedians, and always features at least one debutante. There couldn’t be a lovelier environment to enjoy comedy in – maybe the plushness of the walls does something fundamental to you, because the vibes are always impeccable. The next one, on 5 March, is hosted by Kiwi stand-up Alice Brine and features upcomers Omodara Olatunji and Pravana Pillay.

The best nights are the ones that cram in a smörgåsbord of styles – they might not all be for you, but something probably will be. Girlfriend Club at The Castle in Aldgate is one such treat, spanning the entire spectrum from good old-fashioned stand-up, to uncategorisable stand-up, to uncategorisable, miscellaneous and weird character comedy (arguably, the art form at its highest). Headlining the next monthly show on 13 March is Edinburgh Comedy Award winner, Jordan Brookes, who can also be seen attempting to mount the definitive Titanic musical in Soho while avoiding a breakdown – the jury’s out on how successful he is in either direction, but it makes for seriously excellent comedy (on until 1 March). He’s always a shock to the senses. And that’s just next month.

On the Razz in… the Dirty South-East

All of us knew that we’d have to surrender some of the places we have jealously gatekept for ourselves. So let’s just rip the plaster off and get on with it: The Rising Sun in Lewisham has the most beautiful beer garden in London. It’s stunning, seriously – a lush little portal at the back of a pronouncedly Millwall boozer, flanked with just enough foliage to feel secluded, pints punctuated by the elegant chunter of the DLR whirring past. You don’t come here for the ale selection, so expect whatever Diageo’s are supplying this year. Have a couple in the spring sun before you start the climb up Lewisham Way; there’s plenty more to come.

As you walk, you’ll pass Dr Noodle, which can’t go without a brief nod: a direct transplant of a noodle shop from Nanking, dropped off in Brockley with identical recipes – it’s the best bowl of anything in the city and they’re resolutely BYOB. But we’re not going here tonight. We’re stopping off at a genuine outlaw of a pub, the Royal George. Ostensibly a Sam Smith’s, but run by a pair of Goldsmiths postgrads, the George operates well outside of the Tadcaster orbit, keeping pints below a fiver (and below £4 last year) while disregarding the usual strictures that the brewer loves putting on its establishments. There’s art, darts and a roaring fire, books by e.e. cummings and Riley Reid on the shelves. Stop for a Taddy’s at 2017 prices, and keep their tills ringing before head office finds out what they’ve been up to.

We’re staggering down Tanner’s Hill, past the looming estates and onto the ever-raucous Deptford High Street – at long last, dinner time. We haven’t made a reservation, but that’s fine, Tea House always has a table free; a travesty, really, for how good it is. If Tea House was in Chinatown, you would never, ever get in. Get the turnip cake in XO sauce, the best £6 you’ll ever spend. Get the giant pile of soft-shell crab, buried six feet under in chillies and fried garlic. Get two rounds of custard buns and another Tsingtao for the road. It’s a long, long journey home.

Port Overboard, Starboard Home

It’s now well over 40 years since the publication of The Sloane Ranger Handbook. Most of the restaurants listed in the book are no more. The stalwarts – Bistro Vino, San Lorenzo and Menage à Trois among them – are shut.

Yet the Sloanes haven’t gone away from their original watering hole, despite migrations south to Battersea and north-west to Notting Hill. The vagaries of the British property market are such that their children are now stomping the same ground as their parents once did. So where are they eating?

Current Sloane haunts are, a bit like the previous manifestations, not places that serve particularly good food. Instead, all these places serve comforting, middle-to-low standard fare, generally Italian. They dole out decent wine and cocktails. They are generally overpriced for what they provide, but not bank-breakers. Crucially, their careworn staff often have an exceptionally high tolerance for obnoxious behaviour.

Despite this formula, they come in different ‘flavours’, and if you’re a fan of spending a lot of money on not very much in the company of dreadful people, these are the places to go. For La Bella Sloanissima, try La Famiglia, Caraffini, La Delizia or Ziani – all distinctly Chelsea, all resolutely midzo. For something approaching French, poke your head into the actually-quite-nice La Poule au Pot. £15 cocktails named after local slebs can be found at the weird PJ’s on Fulham Road, if you fancy getting blind drunk off too many Jamie Laings. And for a Sunday lunch, watch the Sloanes scoff their £65-a-head roasts by the riverside at No. Fifty Cheyne (no prizes for guessing their address).

Here’s renowned hair shirt-wearer, Saint Thomas More, scowling at the present-day exuberance of his neighbourhood (photo by Will Pelham)

The following guide is definitive, as verified by Peter York, co-author of The Sloane Ranger Handbook, who, when we rang him and went through the list, told us that we got this ‘absolutely correct’. But he was at pains to make clear that La Poule au Pot is not in Pimlico, as many people think: it’s in south Belgravia.

Getting Down to Bizetness

London’s opera-goers have been taken aback by Festen, proof, contra the received wisdom of the programmers at Covent Garden and the Coliseum, that new operas outside the classics can be good and can sell tickets. The reviews haven’t just been glowing, they’ve been electric. Though you will have now missed the chance to see it – the current run ends today – it’s an encouraging sign of what might be around the corner for opera and for the arts in general in London. One of those who did manage to get tickets, Lamorna Ash, offers a few words on the Royal Opera House’s sleeper hit, which is an adaptation of the 1998 film.

After six months spent editing his debut feature – shot on the smallest, crappiest, low-resolution, home video flip-screen camera – Thomas Vinterberg knew he had failed. ‘I couldn’t feel anything,’ he explained. ‘I watched a film that brought me nowhere.’ But then they were invited to screen Festen at Cannes. As soon as the credits rolled, the audience exploded into applause and Vinterberg understood that he had made nothing less than a masterpiece.

Why is Festen so good? What in its essential composition ensures that such knock-out power carries over so absolutely into Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new opera adaptation? Because, ultimately, a setting like the Royal Opera House – all that glamour and gilded extravagance, monumentally beautiful sets, exquisite music and decadent costumes – is the opposite environment to the one out of which the 1998 film was produced. Festen was made on the principles of Dogme 95, a new filmmaking ideology dreamed up by Vinterberg and fellow Dane, Lars von Trier, which proposed that since cinema had been ‘cosmeticised to death’ for the purpose of fooling audiences with visual tricks, they would make only wholly naturalistic, cinema verité films, lacking any optical work or filters, any soundtrack or extradiegetic music at all.

The answer is the quality of the storytelling itself – isn’t it always? The tragedy which plays out in Festen is not that the patriarch of a family raped two of his children as kids – a revelation disclosed by one of the children he assaulted (the other recently killed herself) during a speech at the father’s 60^th birthday. The tragedy is that no one gives a rat’s ass. The party guests’ response is one of horrifying collective denial. The festivities go on; it only gets more exuberant. Watching it – either as a film or as an opera – feels like going insane.

After the son’s speech, the composer Mark Anthony Turnage leaves space for a long, dreadful silence. I know nothing about opera and I could only see half the stage as a result of our cheap balcony seats, but it felt like the most radical and shocking thing, to bear witness to such a silence in a space like the Royal Opera House. You could feel everything. At the end, the audience exploded.

Praying for Time

Highgate Cemetery is a place so comically spooky that it feels like you’ve stumbled on a stage set. Up Swain’s Lane, the steepest hill in London, and a good wander away from a tube station, it is, in that wonderful phrase, a ‘working cemetery’, though you imagine that the crowds will come in greater numbers after an £18 million upgrade, which comes largely courtesy of the National Lottery.

The East Side has Karl Marx, and people taking photos of the sign for Karl Marx and toilets. The West Side, which is only open for group visits, is the thing to come for. Bearing to the right, and straining up the hill, you will pass some unlikely gravefellows: Beryl Bainbridge, Ugo Ehiogu and Lord Ravenscroft. Through the thicket of ash trees, invisible, are some of the best views in London. Foxes stare at you imperiously. There is nowhere uncannier in London, you think to yourself, as you pass the lead-lined casket of Alexander Litvinenko.

Around the corner, you reach one of the more recent burials. In front of you are the three graves of the Panayiotou family, Georgios, Lesley, Melanie, all united in death. George Michael has been elevated to unlikely sainthood. A cruiser, a drug addict, a recluse, a proto-poster, the singer was, for most of his life, one of the most famous people in the world. When he died on Christmas Day in 2016, the lawn outside his house at the top of the hill was turned into a shrine by his fans.

Michael wrote and performed some of the greatest pop songs in the canon and was known for baroque displays of generosity. Here, his grave is unadorned by trinkets and candles and rain-sodden photos, but is ringed with 12 pots of flowers. You may stand over it, alone, for ten minutes or so, and contemplate the laurels of one of the most fascinating Londoners of our lifetimes, before heading to the top of the hill, and the gothic dread of the Egyptian Avenue.

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That’s plenty for this edition. It’s free for the time being, but if you’re enjoying it so much that you want to become a paid subscriber, we’re not going to stop you, in fact, we encourage you. Go and enjoy our recommendations, and tell us when you do – nothing makes us happier. If you’d like to see all of our tips on a big, beautiful map, we have that here for you too, updated every week. Have fun, share this around and we’ll see you next time, which will be on this platform.

All the best,

TF